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... amarna Letters, which dates from the late reign of Amenhotep III into that of Tutankhamen. Scholars have long pondered an identification for the troublesome Habiru of the Letters, though have concluded these nomad-raiders must have been a separate (if possibly related) group from the Hebrews (Ibm), who still would have resided in Egypt at the time of the royal correspondence in question (according to the traditional dating which places their Exodus some 140 years later). With his New Chronology making late-Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt contemporary with the rise of the United Monarchy in Israel, Rohl finds a Habiru/ Hebrew synchronism not only possible but certain. Looking at the detailed biblical accounts of the military activities of the first Israelite king, Saul, Rohl sees an amazing similarity in the reported maraudings of a renegade hill-country ruler named Labayu (Great Lion), who is repeatedly complained about in the Amarna Letters by Egypt s Levantine vassals (and is himself the author of letters to the Egyptian king). And the Habiru rebel Data, also subject of frequent reference in Letters, is equated by Rohl with Saul s rebellious son-in-law, David, dynastic founder of Jerusalem making the latter king a contemporary with Egyptian pharaohs Akhenaten to Horemheb and Hittite employer Suppliluliumas I.
This is but the briefest summary of the author s lengthy, greatly detailed discussion of the advent of the United Monarchy in Israel, made possible, he believes, by the deterioration of Egypt s hegemony in So-Palestine during the Amarna and post-Amarna years, coupled with Mitanni s defeat by the Hittites during the same period. Part Four of A Test of Time is titled Discovering the Israelites: The Sojourn in Egypt and the Conquest of the Promised Land. Before launching forward, Rohl cautions readers that they are about to enter a very different kind of world from what they have experienced in parts One through Three. There, he explains, his New Chronology arguments and their biblical synchronisms have been grounded on established historical methodology and other traditional material evidence provided by archaeology, inscribed monuments, surviving archives, etc. But as he necessarily moves his search for the origins of the ancient Israelites back in time beyond the New Kingdom to the well-lighted Twelfth Dynasty, a realm of darkness in Egypt is encountered (the Second Intermediate Period), a span of several centuries during which there is a scarcity of tangible source-material, causing Rohl to rely more heavily on the traditions laid down in the biblical narratives of Genesis and Exodus, and in Manetho s (and others) imprecise history of Egypt. Having made this caveat, the author spends Chapter Eleven (Navigating by the Stars) in a complex discussion of such incomprehensible scientific techniques as astronomical retro calculation, whereby esoteric data on something called the Ugarit Eclipse Tablet (KTU- 1. 78) determines for Rohl and others that Amenhotep III died just months before a solar eclipse was observed on May 9, 1012 B.
C. Knowing this certainty (? ), the author is able to count Eighteenth Dynasty reign-lengths backwards to arrive at a New Kingdom start-date (Ahmose I) of 1194 B. C. , rather than the generally accepted circa 1570. Then, using data in the Royal Canon of Turin, Rohl further calculates that the first ruler of the Hyksos Fifteenth Dynasty took power 108 years prior to the Asiatics expulsion from Egypt by Ahmose (1183 B. C. ), in circa 1290 B. C.
As if all of this were not obtuse enough, the author then resorts to astronomical retro calculation of Venus observations in the Ammisaduga Texts of Babylon, to ultimately arrive at the determination that the Thirteenth Dynasty s Neferhotep I ruled in the second half of the Sixteenth Century B. C. (ca. 1540 - 1530), rather than at the beginning of the Seventeenth (according to conventional chronology). Whew! Which brings us to A Test of Time s key Chapter Twelve, Moses and Khenephrs, wherein David Rohl reveals the identity of the king of the Bondage as Khaneferre Sobekhotep IV (successor once removed to Neferhotep I), whom James H.
Breasted pronounced as the greatest ruler of the Second Intermediate Period. It was during his some twenty-year reign that Moses grew up to be a prince of Egypt, Rohl argues. After tracing the Egyptian career of Moses (including his leading an invasion of Kush), the author turns to a discussion of Austrian archaeologist Manfred Bietak s on-going excavations at Tell ed Data (Avaris) in the eastern Delta (biblical Goshen) and his discovery there of a sizeable Egyptianized- Asiatic community, which occupied the habitation-and-cemetery site from the end of the Twelfth Dynasty throughout most of the Thirteenth. Coincidentally Tell ed Data is also the site of later-New Kingdom Pi-Ramesse (biblical Raameses), capital of the Nineteenth Dynasty, although no evidence of any Asiatic settlement was found by the Austrian excavator in that particular stratum of occupation. Thus, Rohl concludes that the only period in Egyptian history with incontrovertible archaeological evidence for a large Asiatic population in the eastern delta... is the Second Intermediate Period the era into which the New Chronology places the historical events which lie at the heart of the traditional stories of the Israelite Sojourn, Bondage and Exodus.
And so, at last, comes Rohl s explanation of the historical basis of the Exodus in his Chapter Thirteen (Exodus, simply enough). Even the biblically semi-literate know that this event was associated with a series of plagues brought down on Egypt by the Hebrew god, Yahweh, the tenth and last of these being a divine extermination of the first-born of the Egyptians, starting with the Crown Prince and extending even to livestock (! ). Well, Rohl turns again to Tell ed Data and Bietak s uncover there of so-called plague pits with large numbers of human skeletal remains in what amount to mass graves. It was at the time of these gruesome group interments, Rohl reports, that the Egyptianized-Asiatic settlement at Tell ed Data/Avaris was abandoned lock, stock and barrel (not to be occupied again until some time later when non-Egyptianized Asiatic squatters read Hyksos moved into the empty and crumbling town and made it their own). What better way to explain away these phenomena but a Tenth Plague and the Exodus? And so, for Rohl, circumstantial archaeology fleshes out the myth!
He is even able to sort out using Manetho and the Turin Canon and those generational calculations he likes so much exactly which king of Egypt is to be identified as Pharaoh of the Exodus, and that is a little-known Dudimose, thirty-sixth and last ruler of the Thirteenth Dynasty (it seems there were twelve occupants of the throne while Moses was out of the country). So Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt at the end of the murky Thirteenth Dynasty, says Rohl. But, say you, what about those 600 chariots Pharaoh s army used to pursue the refugees across the fateful Sea of Reeds? Weren t horses and charity introduced to the Egyptians by the Hyksos a dynasty or two later?
Not so, according to the author of A Test of Time, and he cites glove evidence (you ll have to read the book to find out what that is) and slim archaeological equine finds (horse teeth) supposedly dating to the Thirteenth Dynasty strata at Tell ed Data, to argue that the Egyptians were horsemen somewhat earlier than previously supposed. And those Hyksos? Rohl offers that they were Amalekite tribesmen who entered Egypt soon after the Hebrews left (the two groups met in battle, he says, in the Sinai, when their different paths crossed), settling into the town abandoned by those who followed Moses, which these invaders eventually rebuilt as their capital, Avaris. It was an effort to get through Rohl s Chapter Fifteen, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, since it deals with all that Joshua/Jericho and other post-Moses, pre-David biblical Conquest business, in which I don t have much interest, frankly. But Joseph the Vizier, Chapter Fifteen, did perk me up, since Rohl gets back to Egypt and makes a well-reasoned case for the biblical Joseph having actually flourished during the reigns of the Twelfth Dynasty s Amenemhat III and his immediate successors.
Rohl uses complicated Nile inundation records from those three reigns to identify the fat and lean years of the Joseph story, and he points persuasively to the Amenemhat III Labyrinth and the Bahr Yussef canal as evidences of the Hebrew vizier s enterprises on behalf of his king. He explains Joseph s Egyptian name (Zaphenat-Pa area) as a Hebrew metathesis of Djeduenef (he who is called) and the Egyptian name Ipiankhu (well attested in the Middle Kingdom, but not later, apparently). But I began to wax sceptical when Rohl goes on to claim that the Austrians have found at Tell ed Data: (1) foundation evidence of the house built by Joseph for his father, Jacob; (2) ruins of his own retirement palace Joseph built over the former site; and (3) the tomb of Joseph on these same palace grounds, near which was uncovered (4) the badly battered head of a non-royal colossal cult-statue, which Rohl believes depicts Joseph himself (! ), and of which he has done a full-color (coat of many colors) reconstruction, using lots of imagination. As I stated above, A Test of Time is a piece of work and provocative, and its author s evidences and arguments are indeed persuasive. But was I persuaded, especially regarding the New Chronology? Much of what David Rohl presents in the elaborate tapestry of Time must be received in good faith, simply because my own knowledge in so many areas he deals with is slim to non-existent.
However, my confidence in his overall scholarship was shaken somewhat right in Chapter Two, Secrets of the Pharaohs, where I caught Rohl in several simple errors of fact. The Royal-Mummies Cache, DB 320, has been the subject of my own extensive research of late, and so I believe I am more than merely familiar with the subject. Rohl is mistaken, for example, when he writes that American tourist Charles Edwin Wilbour was sent as an antiquities-spy to Luxor by mile (which Rohl spells mil) Brugsch; and he gives as the latter's dates (actually 1842 - 1930) those of his brother, Heinrich Brugsch (1827 - 1894). It was Gaston Maspero, in fact, Wilbour's former teacher, who asked him to make inquiries in Luxor regarding illicit antiquities that seemed to be coming from an unknown royal tomb. When, in Maspero's absence, Brugsch traveled to Luxor to take possession of the cache of royal mummies, the existence of which had been revealed by Mohamed Abd er Rassul, he was accompanied by two Bulak Museum colleagues, one of whom David Rohl twice identifies as Madame Thadeos Matafian, although it is quite clear that this individual certainly was not female, since Maspero twice refers to him and Brugsch s other Bulak colleague as MM.
Thadeos Matafian... [et] Ahmed Effendi Kamal (Les Movies Royale's, p. 516), and MM. is, of course, the abbreviation of Messieurs. More seriously, Rohl writes that The unwrapping of the royal mummies did not get underway until May 1886 but, once begun, was completed within two months. The examination was supervised by Maspero and British anatomist Sir Grafton Elliot Smith the great mummy specialist of his day. Five errors in two sentences: (1) Thutmose III was unwrapped by Brugsch in July 1881, but the poor condition of the mummy discouraged Maspero from exposing others of the DB 320 royal-remains until 1886; (2) not all of the latter were, in fact, unwrapped at that time, several individuals being left for later; (3) the medical person in attendance at these 1886 unwrapping's was Dr. Daniel M.
Fouquet; (4) anatomist G. Elliot Smith examined the already-unwrapped DB 320 mummies (and completed unwrapping others) between 1905 and 1909 (he would prepare The Royal Mummies Catalogue General volume for publication in 1912); and (5) Smith was Australian and not British. None of these are egregious mistakes in David Rohl's research, to be sure. But they are there and not likely an editor s unchecked insertions. Which leads this reader to wonder how many more and more serious errors remain to be pointed out by specialists in those several areas of scholarship so authoritatively presented by Rohl in his A Test of Time. Bibliography:
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